Monday, 22 April 2013

London Book Fair

Last week I
went to the London Book Fair. It was my first visit, and it's certainly a
spectacular event. It takes up the whole of Earls Court, which is a pretty big
building. It's packed with booksellers, publishers, ancillary businesses, even
somebody selling reading lights. There's lots of free gifts and hospitality and
a general buzz about the place. It's all rather surprising because, corralled
in a corner with the other authors, the impression I had was that the
publishing industry is in a mess with no one having any real idea what the next
year or twoholds.

One thing
that seems pretty certain is that you're going to find more and more writers
producing blogs like this. No one is quite sure how blogs work but authors are
now expected to market their own books and social media are definitely an
important part of their marketing effort. Or, as one speaker put it, "A
necessary evil.” So I guess I'll be turning this out, more or less once a week,
for the foreseeable future. It's a good thing I enjoy writing blog posts, as
they seem to take time that could otherwise be spent writing books. Still, it's
all worthwhile, so long as my blog readers go out and buy my novels. You do buy
my novels, don't you?

I'm obviously
a complete beginner at this whole blogging thing. According to the same
speaker, I should be aiming to have 3,000 Facebook followers. Even allowing
that people following the blog are presumably more significant than people
following Facebook, I think I have a way to go to build on the fourteen followers
the blog has. With over 1,000 pageviews a month I obviously have more than
fourteen readers (unless some of you are spending far too much time rereading
my stuff). If you are a regular reader, it might be worth joining the site.
(Click the blue button towards the bottom of the column on the right of the
page.) This may make your life marginally more convenient and apparently will encourage
Random House to pick up my next book for a six-figure advance.

In reality,
of course, Random House will not be giving me a six-figure advance, even in the
unlikely event of their buying my book. Publishers are apparently responding to
the changes in market by reserving advances for books they know will sell,
which means books by authors who have sold already (good news for Dan Brown
fans) and for celebrities who may not be able to write at all but whose books
will attract a more or less guaranteed readership from their fan base. And, if
debut authors do get an advance, they are increasingly expected to spend some
of it on doing marketing that used to be done by the publishers. Hence
increasing numbers of writers are deciding that, if they don't get money or
sales support from their publishers, they might as well do it themselves. This
is one of the factors driving the massive growth in self-publishing. (Note that
I'm not self-published. JMS Books is an independent publisher – a sort of
half-way house between traditional publishers and self-publishing.) Self-publishing
brings its own problems, though. The charming lady who suggested that she could
promote my book for £2,000 was honest enough to point out that she was unable
to guarantee any boost to sales at all. I shouldn't, she said, pay her the
money unless I was prepared to write the whole amount off with no tangible benefit.
In the fine tradition of the News of the World, I made my excuses and
left.

What
conclusions can you draw from all this?

I think it's
safe to say that the next few years will see more and more authors producing
more and more books. The total number of books that people read will go up, but
(thanks to the incredible cheapness of e-books) the amount that is spent will
likely decline. The average sales books make, except for a handful of heavily
promoted titles, will be tiny. I was told that any book selling over a hundred
copies these days should be viewed as a success. Only a tiny proportion (3%, if
I recall correctly) will sell more than a thousand copies.

Part of the
reason why so many books will have such low readership is that many of them are
appallingly badly written. I do the odd bit of reviewing and quite a high
proportion of the books I'm sent I do not review as, "This book is barely
literate and should be avoided like the plague," is not really a terribly
helpful thing to say. Unfortunately, as you trawl through the millions of books
available online, separating the wheat from the chaff is becoming increasingly
difficult. In theory, this is one of the things that mainstream publishers can
do. The fact that a book is published by Penguin or Macmillan should mean that
it meets at least a basic quality level. However, when a leading publisher
produces a celebrity autobiography by a woman who proudly claims never to have
read a book in her life, you have to wonder what quality standards are being imposed.
Whether or not you like mummy porn, there is no serious doubt that there are
better examples out there than 50 Shades Of Grey, but that hasn't stopped
Random House paying E L James a seven figure advance. I think it is fair to say
that you will still be on your own trying to find the good stuff in 2014.

Given that
mainstream publishers are viewed with increasing suspicion by their authors and
offer no quality guarantees to their readers, it's a pretty fair bet that their
market is due a major shakeup. We've already seen two of the biggest houses –
Random House and Penguin – merging and we can expect to see most second-tier
publishers either merging or going under. The winner, of course, will be Amazon.
Its infernal star rating system and all those reader reviews provide at least
some sort of guidance when you come to choose a book. (Some people might have
preferred GoodReads, but since Amazon bought GoodReads, it's likely that the
one major challenger to Amazon as an arbiter of reader taste will soon be
toeing the party line.) Amazon are moving into publishing themselves and it's a
fair bet that most of the recommendations that will pop up when you log into
the site will soon be books that they have a direct interest in. This doesn't
make them bad people. Amazon have been ahead of the game for a while. Seeing a
slot between the new world of digital self-publishing and the old school
mainstream behemoths, they are moving into grab it with a single-minded
ruthlessness which I can't help but admire. On the other hand, a world in which
Amazon is the only significant commercial publisher is likely, in the
long-term, to be good news for neither writers nor readers.

It's going to
be a tough old world out there. Writers will carry on writing and you, dear reader,
will, I hope, carry on buying their books. And an agent expressed the faintest
glimmer of interest in something I'd done. So, despite the gloom, we’ll soldier
on. People have been telling stories since the dawn of time. I guess we'll
probably still be telling them come the London Book Fair 2014.

About Me

Tom used to write books for business, covering everything from the gambling industry to new developments in printing technology. Now he writes about love and adventure in the 19th century, which is not nearly as well paid, but much more fun. It also allows him to pretend that travelling in the Far East and South America is research.
Tom lives in London. His main interest is avoiding doing any honest work and this leaves him with time to ski, skate and dance tango, all of which he does quite well.